The number of Russian tourists visiting the Czech Republic is falling sharply while there is growth in visitors from other countries, and as Czechs continue to happily welcome Russian visitors, the trend shows the weaker Russian ruble is taking a toll on its vacationers.

Between April and June, there were ‎30,200 fewer Russians visiting the Czech Republic than a year earlier, which represents a 14% annual decline.

Russians are the second-largest group of tourists to the Czech Republic only behind Germans. In 2013, 1.39 million Germans and 759,138 Russians visited the Czech Republic.

The decline in Russian tourist numbers is driven primarily by the weakness of the ruble, which was approximately 15% weaker on year versus the euro in the second quarter. Read More »

Prague and Bratislava are sometimes referred to as cities in Czechoslovakia despite the peaceful Velvet Divorce cast the Czech Republic and Slovakia on their separate ways in January 1993. A small group of exporters has decided to capitalize on the error.

This week state-owned export banks from the two countries signed a cooperation agreement meant to boost their exports in markets where both states are actively looking to close deals. They say there is substantial crossover in their geographic sights and in the wares they sell.

The novel element of the agreement is to revive the “Made in Czechoslovakia” label of origin that would be affixed to locally-made goods. The ‘Made In’ label will be a brand rather than an appellation of origin, with a capital S for Slovakia. Read More »

As World Cup fever nears a crescendo and Brazil’s footballers move to the semi-finals, that country’s best skateboarders are also battling to win a cup in the Czech capital. This weekend they joined with other global legends in Prague for the jubilee 20th annual Mystic Skate Cup.

Now with a quarter-century of freedom in the rear-view mirror and two decades of rough and tumble skateboarding in the history books, Prague is a firm fixture on the world stage and is among cities hosting major skateboarding events each year.

To commemorate this 20-year milestone, organizers built an entirely new street course and rebuilt the sumptuous Mystic bowl, steps that helped attract stars to try their luck in Prague, including American legend Christian Hosoi. Read More »

Hungary’s newest advertisement tax will reduce the 2014 net profit of German media conglomerate RTL Group, the company said, calling the tax confiscatory and a blow to foreign investment and media freedom.

The firm’s Hungarian nation-wide television channel, RTL Klub is the most popular private TV channel in Hungary.

Hungary’s parliament, in which the governing Fidesz party holds a two-thirds majority, passed legislation on Friday that will require all privately-owned media companies to pay a special tax on advertising, a significant source of their revenues. All major private media companies had protested against the bill in early June with a broadcast and publication blackout.

The bill is, however, “seemingly specifically” aimed at RTL, company executives said Monday.

With its annual advertising revenue of more than 20 billion Hungarian forints ($87.5 million), RTL Hungary is currently the only media company that falls under the 40% top rate of the progressively increasing levy, the company added.

“We thus call on the Hungarian government, again, to revise this counterproductive tax policy seemingly specifically aiming at RTL, as it undermines its operations and raises major concerns about the freedom of journalism in Hungary,” Anke Schaeferkordt and Guillaume de Posch, co-CEOs of RTL Group, said in a joint statement. Read More »

The 49th Karlovy Vary Film Festival kicked off Friday night with its highest honor awarded to Mel Gibson amid protests from the Czech Jewish community, which said the actor was spreading anti-Semitic views in his work.

The 58-year-old actor and director, who shot to fame for staring in the “Mad Max” and “Braveheart” blockbusters, received the festival’s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema.

But the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities questioned giving the lifetime achievement award to Mr. Gibson, saying that his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ” is steeped in “classic stereotypes” about Jews that claim they were responsible for Jesus’s death.

“At the time of increasing anti-Semitism Mr. Gibson’s work can be easily used to justify anti-Jewish hatred,” said Petr Papousek, the head of the Jewish federation. Read More »

BUDAPEST–”We had the yellow star posted on the main entrance of the house, but none of our Christian neighbors moved out,” says Tamas Marton, who was 14 when Budapest residents defined as Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary were forced 70 years ago today to move into so-called yellow-star houses to live.

When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, it immediately started organizing the deportation of the Jews. Budapest had a very large Jewish population, over 220,000 people or some 20% to 25% of the inhabitants.

The German Nazis decided it would be too complicated to create a ghetto. Instead, they dedicated some 2,000 buildings scattered around the city to become Yellow Star houses and obliged Jewish families–mostly women, children and the elderly since men had been on forced work since 1941–to move in there by June 21, 1944. Non-Jewish families in the meantime had to move elsewhere or put a sign on their doors, reading “No Jew lives here.”

“We left everything in our apartment behind. We only took what we could in two small suitcases,” said retired agent for artists Maria Rona, who was 10 years old when her family of five was expelled from their home. Read More »

Content is not free. Ads are one of the means to finance media. The ad tax, as proposed, will undermine a significant number of media companies. Functioning Hungarian media is in the interest of every Hungarian. That’s why WE OBJECT TO THE AD TAX.

Index.hu’s website

Hungarian privately-owned media outlets will hold a 15-minute blackout Thursday evening and printed press will publish with a blank page on Friday to protest against the government’s plan to levy a high tax on advertising, a step they claim is aimed at putting pressure on non-state media.

In an unprecedented move of cooperation in the media sector, over 70, almost all of Hungary’s most prominent media outlets, have joined the campaign. Several of them are reckoned as usually siding with the government. The tax will disproportionately burden the country’s most popular private TV channel RTL Klub, the channel said.

Levying the new tax will be one of the very first economic measures of the Fidesz-party government, which won parliamentary elections for a second consecutive term with a landslide victory in general elections in April.

The ad tax, whose approval by the Fidesz-dominated parliament is not in doubt, will follow the special sectoral taxes Fidesz has levied on various services sectors since 2010. The biggest players in these sectors–the banking, telecommunications, large retail and utilities industries–are foreign firms. These firms had made “excessive” profits in the previous years, the government claimed when taxing them.

That argument doesn’t hold for Hungary’s advertising business, which has been shrinking since 2008, in line with global trends, said Zsolt Urban, president of the Hungarian Advertising Association or MRSZ. Read More »

The oldest profession in the world faces a challenge in the Czech industrial city Ostrava, where police Tuesday announced that over the weekend they conducted the “Angel” operation, which centered on raids in 25 houses of ill-repute and related properties, leading to over 160 people being interrogated, nine kept in custody and 23 charged with pimping.

Those charged face prison sentences of between six months and four years and some of the accused have already pleaded guilty, the regional prosecutor’s office said without providing any further details.

Gabriela Holcakova, a spokeswoman for the Czech Police, said the sweeping move is part of a long-term investigation into the illegal business in the area, which is generally better known for its coal mining, steel making and hazy air quality.

Such raids are relative novelties in the country where prostitution is widely accepted. Many local and national politicians are calling for its full legalization and just this January a bill was put to the Czech parliament to legalize services providing sexual gratification in the capital city. Read More »

Hungary’s government and central bank are eager to repatriate Hungarian artwork they judge as significant to shore up national pride and identity.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is on course according to the latest polls to head the country for another four years after parliamentary elections seven days from now, was visibly proud last week to announce the state had re-possessed part of the Sevso Treasure–large silver plates and caskets dating back to ancient Rome–for 15 million euros ($20.6 million).

Hungary’s central bank said in January that it plans to spend 100 million euros ($136.8 million) by the end of 2018 on buying Hungarian works of art that have ended up in foreign hands during the country’s eventful history.

Visual art as well as literature plays a core role to define Hungarian identity. The cultivation of a sense of national togetherness is among the main goals of the current government, in which central bank Governor György Matolcsy, a close ally of the prime minister, served as economy minister between 2010 and March 2013.

“Hungarians have survived throughout the ages because they have been feeding on the 1,000-year-old cultural heritage of the Hungarian Kingdom, the statehood, only morsels of which have survived,” said Mária Prokopp, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Art at the Eötvös Lóránd University in Budapest.

The goal of the central bank’s art program “is to repatriate the highest possible number of major works of art” to protect and treasure the nation’s cultural legacy, the National Bank of Hungary said. It didn’t say how it intended to finance the program that roughly equals three times its operating expenses in 2012.

“This is an unbelievably significant amount. It’s the biggest ever sum Hungary will have spent on art in its modern-age history,” said László Baán, director general of Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. Mr. Baán is also a member of the central bank’s four-member advisory body on possible purchases. Read More »

BUDAPEST—Hungary’s feisty leader, heading toward a reelection in April, since 2010 has given his nation a new constitution, a revamped central bank, new regulators and even a new way to buy tobacco. His latest idea: a new institute for the Hungarian language.

The Hungarian Language-Strategy Institute will start to operate April 1 and is supposed encourage correct use of the language.

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family, making Finnish and Estonian the only relatives in Europe. It’s spoken by about 10 million people in Hungary and a further three to five million living abroad, mostly in territories held by Hungary before World War I. In 1920, the Treaty of Trianon, still often lamented in Hungary, awarded more than two thirds of “Greater Hungary” to neighboring countries, leaving a third of native Hungarian speakers outside the country’s present borders.

The establishment of a new language body is part of the Fidesz-party government’s much-criticized drive to set up new institutes. The new bodies have followed Fidesz’s preferred understanding of a given subject and exist sometimes side-by-side or on top of other organizations already engaged in the same realm. Read More »

About Emerging Europe

Emerging Europe Real Time provides sharp analysis and insight into what’s making news in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the expertise of our reporters in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey, the site provides an inside track on economics, politics and business in this emerging part of the European continent.